I recently read an article from Accenture’s Talent and Organization group titled Driving successul transformational change through journey management. It contained very practical high level advice on successfully deploying change programs which are global in their scale, complex in their scope and long-term (meaning multi-year) in their duration. It struck a chord with me because at Ezwim we are in the business of providing global Managed Mobility Services which support initiatives which are part of a larger change program and should certainly include a Journey Management function at the helm. In the context of our business we call this journey the Chaos to Competitive Advantage continuum.

The Chaos to Competitive Advantage continuum is a practical way of helping businesses who unfortunately do not use advanced transformational management tools to understand where they are in terms of understanding their existing situation, what the end-game looks like and how to get there. As a vendor to large corporations it can seem strange that we provide our customers with guidance to successfully negotiate the complexities of their own company. However when seeking to create joint strategic value the interests of vendor and customer are well aligned.

So for today’s enterprise seeking to make a transformational change which comprises greater competition in the labor market, a more flexible workforce in terms of location or working hours, an expansion into new territories, a greater control of information and its technological conduits or any initiative which will impact the way in which employees communicate with each other or the outside world, here are a best pratices:

1. Understanding your starting point is absolutely critical. However good ideas can stall and opportunities can be missed if momentum is lost early on. Therefore identifying the “known unknowns”, seeking to quantify their risk and revisiting them while driving the program forward requires a standardized process. Where there is a concentration of “known unknown” in areas which are considered to be low hanging fruit or high value sub-projects alarm bells should be ringing
2. When dealing with a global change, spend significant time identifying the local stakeholders during the planning phase. The stakeholders may not be who you expect them to be but if they are truly stakeholders their input will be critical to success. Creating localized sponsorship which includes both those with a leaning towards the “as-is” state of the business to those clearly shining examples of the “to be” situation is preferable in most cases. Transformational changes by nature will last langer than the active participation of many stakeholders requiring a rubust continuous stakeholder management process
3. Keep your objectives clear and understandable to all. Although extremely granular reporting metrics should be employed within the change program it is important that the mission statement of the transformation contains only a few concise value statements which can be achieved employing different methods. This becomes especially valuable when dealing with resistance to change with internal or external stakeholders. If the method of change is included in the mission statement the chances of being able to deploy it everywhere are significantly reduced

In summary we all have to undergo these kinds of changes in one form or another. Having even a basic understanding of the best practices employed by successful companies or institutes is a good idea for all involved. Not just for the obvious managerial and supply chain players but, if the transformation is done properly, it can also personally benefit all employees who follow the basic advice above.

Finally credit where credit is due; thank you Teri Babcock and Adam Riley for writing the Accenture article mentioned above.

The simultaneous rise of two global mega-trends, Consumerization of IT and The War for Talent, have had an enormous effect on human society in general and continue to challenge corporate IT and HR departments within the global enterprise. Whether one perceives these trends as a threat or an opportunity one thing is for sure; they are here to stay. So what makes most sense in terms of dealing with these trends within the global enterprise? Strict restrictive policies or empowerment within the boundaries of corporate governance?

An Intrapreneur is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “A person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation”. On its own this is likely something that every global enterprise is willing to allow and / or stimulate in one way or another. But when put into the context of the aforementioned mega-trends, there is a significant likelihood that the Intrapreneur is either Generation X or Y (and increasingly Z) and therefore is undertaking his or her Intrapreneurial activities supported by possibly unsecure devices with little or no control over the underlying costs of provisioning, the associated risks increase dramatically. 

In western economies competition for Generation X, Y and Z talent is increasing (even though the current economic climate has swung the labor market towards the “buyer”). One of the major characteristics of these generations (especially Y and Z) is that they are extremely IT savvy. They are capable of executing multiple tasks simultaneously using the same devices and business and private interests are fully intertwined. This has led to the Consumerization of IT whereby highly productive, highly skilled and well educated individuals who are in high demand bring their preferred IT tools into the enterprise either intentionally or unknowingly (“Stealth IT”). In a recent IDC survey of Intrapreneurs (“Consumers”) and CIO’s 14.8% of Intrapreneurs thought that IT innovations where driven by employees whereas 31.2% of CIO’s thought that this was the case. Assuming that CIO’s know how they have spent their budget this shows a naivety on the part of the Intrapreneur regarding the implications of his / her activity. Rather than maliciously seeking to challenge the establishment it is therefore fair to assume that these Intrapreneurs are following their instinct and using the tools they are most familiar with to deliver a profitable undertaking.

Two juxtaposed options arise. Reduce direct tangible risk by enforcing corporate standard tooling / policies and accept the negative impact this may have on the productivity of your most talented employees or stimulate the unquantifiable productivity gain of this risk-taking talent and accept the tangible risk associated with doing so. What do you do?

Realistically the answer is likely to depend on the current exposure your business has to the risk associated with embracing Intrapreneurship. There is no right or wrong and actually there are not two options, rather a maturity spectrum from Command & Control to Harness & Leverage. The key is to find where in this spectrum your business can gain the greatest competitive advantage without going beyond the boundaries of acceptable risk. There are a number of guiding principles which will help you plot your position on this spectrum:

• Understand the behavior of your Intrapreneurs: This goes beyond statistical analysis and will often involve engaging individuals directly.
• Quantify the risks: This is not limited to the risk of exposure to, for example, security breaches but also the risk of missed opportunities or reduced competitive advantage
• Understand the dynamics of diversity: Just because you “loosen the shackles” for your Intrapreneurs does not mean that this should apply to everyone.
• Think like and Intrapreneur: Use technology to your advantage. In the same way that the Intrapreneur (un)wittingly brings technology into your enterprise, you can access similarly readily available technology to manage these new challenges.

One final consideration; industry analyst are already publishing research about “Super-consumers” and “Ubersumers” who will use the web to reintroduce the pre-industrial revolution concept of “made to measure” consumer products to replace the mass produced. While this research is currently intended as an early warning for CxO’s of consumer product manufacturers, CIO’s should be thinking of how to deal with supporting as many unique devices as  he / she has users.

One of the challenges of maintaining Cloud based or Software as a Service (SaaS) TEM solutions is about keeping data in the service up to date. This is especially true in environments where large volumes of data are kept in disparate systems. When information about users and devices are maintained inside of HR systems, the maintaining of the same information inside other services that depend on that information leads to double work. And often leads to errors. SaaS solutions often advertise standard web service integration points where this information can be sent automatically when there are information changes in the source HR system. This can bring the data in both systems in synchronization in regular intervals, or even near real-time. But that requires an investment on the source system side to implement SOAP messaging. An alternative method could involve automated loading of data from spread sheets or flat-files which can be exported from the source at regular intervals.

A handy extension on the traditional TEM solution is asset management. In this extended scenario, the TEM solution is no longer only a consumer of data. The process of managing the lifecycle of assets frequently touches on other domains. For instance, placing an order for new assets involve registering the order at a supplier as well as entering it in the asset management system; leading to double work and the potential of errors. Asset management workflows that handle the authorization of orders could require the fulfilment party to work on the same system. But more and more the operators and resellers are starting to advertise their capabilities as web services. It is fast becoming a necessity to integrate the asset management solution with the fulfilment providers.

Nowadays, there are so many services and websites that is, oh so, handy. Every website used to require a separate login name and password. Thankfully, many of the modern websites, especially social media sites, allow you to login by using your Twitter or Facebook account names. Behind the scenes, there is a technology called Single Sign-On (Single Sign On); and there is many references to OpenID in this area. In the Business to Business environment we have the big brother of SSO, called Federated SSO. Companies that already have active directory based authentication in place, typically have everything inside the company wired in such a way that the end users do not even notice the seamless switching between different applications. This same seamless switching can be extend to some modern cloud services, with little effort on the side of the company or the service.

In an overly (inter-) connected  world, security has to be taken very serious. A number of measures has to be implemented to keep the hackers out and keep the honest folks honest. Every message that arrives at the web service interface needs to be encrypted, in the same way we expect from trusted web sites, by means of SSL. On top of that, some form of access control needs to ensure that every sender only gain access to the correct services and data. Web services security (WS-Security) requires a digital signature on every message. The combination of these measures protects the parties involved in the transactions from a wide range of vulnerabilities, including: identity theft and unauthorized access to confidential information.

Integration is the glue that will help build cloud computing solutions that is less isolated, while enforcing high levels of security.

Those smartphone users have different usage patterns than what the mobile operators were used to. They send mail and read news on their phones. They download games, full length videos and music content. To stay in contact, they use instant messenger applications like WhatsApp to send free messages to their friends. And use VoIP (voice-over-IP) applications like Skype to make voice or even video calls. The operators’ subscription packages were structured around voice and sms traffic, but all these smartphone applications make use of the cheap internet connection only.

The mobile operators are investing large amounts on expanding their networks to cater for this growing data traffic need of their subscribers, but the subscribers were paying less and less for the subscriptions and only making heavy use of the data connection. The next natural step? The big three mobile providers in the Netherlands started talking about and/or slowly implementing ways to block certain types of data traffic. Or if they could not block it, force the users to pay more for the privilege to use those services. However, political outcry put an end to these ideas. The new telecoms law introduced a new concept called net equality and prohibits the operators from asking differential prices for different types of data.

It is adapt or die time for the operators and one by one they are now introducing new price structures. In much the same fashion as we saw the introduction of sms bundles when operators were loosing revenue in the voice area, they are now starting to talk about data bundles to recover from lost revenue in the voice and sms area. A €10 unlimited internet subscription seems to be an endangered species. Smaller, slower and cheaper data bundles were introduced in the lower end of the market. The current unlimited high speed data connections can still be bought for the high end, video downloading and file sharing users, but at a rather staggering price point.

There are questions being raised though; none of the operators are very open with sharing information about how much data really is consumed by the users. No-one is entirely sure how big a data bundle they should be buying when they upgrade their subscriptions again. The consumer should not trust the operators to decide which data bundle fits their usage pattern when the same operator is not forthcoming with accurate usage statistics. It is early days; and the operators will have to come to the party at some stage.

The consumer / smartphone user is not entirely at the mercy of the operators though. Smartphones have more processing power than most home computers had only 4 or 5 years ago. They can be used to measure and process call and data usage information. There are some applications that private smartphone users can install on their own phones for this purpose.

However, in the corporate and enterprise space, there is an opportunity in this market for accurate usage measurements and billing estimates. This opportunity is called Real-Time Telecoms Expense management. In a future post, I will explore this opportunity a little bit more.

Mobile statistics worldwide

Here is a little comparison between trust in the good ol’ days & the way trust works today, just so we have some real world concepts to hang our thoughts on:
When my grandparents still had a farm & grandpa went to the bank, the bank manager would know grandpa & therefore he was allowed to do business. Trust was based on well established knowledge.

Today, I carry an identity card with me in my wallet. When I go to the bank or hospital, they look at my ID card to determine who I am. They don’t trust me because of any knowledge about me; they trust the organization that issued me with the card.

In the computer world, we also have some good ol’ days:

Single Sign-On (SSO)
You have probably used SSO a lot on your office computer without ever thinking about it.  You switch on the computer & it asks you for your name & your password. Windows asks some system in the office environment whether you should be allowed to login (it is called the domain server) & gives you access to the computer.  Then you open your email and it just works without asking you for another password.  That is because some SSO system is in operation that tells your mail who you are.  The same happens when you access your office file server and print to the office printer down the hall.

An identity provider is the one you login first (for example, that domain server) and is the one that knows who you are and what you are allowed to do; like grandpa’s bank manager.

A service provider supplies the thing you use next, for example the office file server or printer. This is grandpa’s bank. Or a website on your intranet. Or, and this is the point of this discussion, a website on the internet.

Moving to the modern time:

Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)
This is a standard XML message format that is used to transfer identity information about a user between an identity provider and a service provider; and this is like my ID card, except that I get a new one for every time I want to do business.

The SAML message contains information about you, called identity claims. It also has some additional security information about the message itself, which helps us determine whether the message really came from your identity provider and whether anybody fiddled with the claims after it was sent.  This feature keeps everybody out of the system that pretends to be you, because we don’t have your bank manager around to ask whether it is really you.

Federated SSO
This adds all of this together.  You login to the company network at your office; at your identity provider.  Then you browse to our website. Your identity provider forwards your identity in a SAML message to us, the service provider.  We look at your ID and give you access to our services, not because we know you per se, but because we trust the identity provider that sent us a copy of your ID.
It is a bit more complex than that though, sorry, but those are the concepts.  On a technical level, it works more like this:

• you open our login URL in your browser
• we redirect your browser with the URL of your identity provider
• you login at your own identity provider, or if you are already logged in, you skip this step
• your identity provider redirects your browser back to the URL of us (the service provider) with your identity nicely wrapped up in a secure SAML message.
• we open the SAML message & give you access to our services, based on the identity claims.

SO, why does this matter?  Well, if your company implements the identity provider side, Federated SSO will remove the need for you to remember yet another set of login credentials for Ezwim Expense Management by giving you access to our services in a secure and robustly authenticated way, directly from your intranet.  For example, Federated Single sign-on allows EEM to be integrated with a client’s Active Directory Federation Services or ADFS (which is the Microsoft solution for Federated Single Sign On).

I attended the Cloud Forum 2010 conference today. Now, the conference is largely aimed at the end users and their IT management who are the ones that are being sold the benefits of “moving to the cloud“. And by elimination, WE are therefore either the service provider they move from or the ones that they would be moving to! What I am often reading about & are trying to learn is this – as a SaaS provider, how do we stay ahead of this move. Should we be a cloud based service provider at all?

In most of the breakout sessions, people presented their company’s vision & product or showed client cases of how their services was successfully applied. It becomes clear to me that the cloud is not a silver bullet, a solution that fits all problems. But it is a game changer. But what is it really?

I’ve had a Hotmail account for over 15 years now. Mail as a Service. Delivered from a data centre somewhere in the US. Those web-based services were really the start of the cloud, except we called it by other names. There’s a point where you can pay a small fee & your google mail account size grows. We talk about elasticity, this growing ability.

Ezwim has products that are only accessible via the internet. As with Yahoo or Google mail, you use the product in your internet browser. It doesn’t come on a CD and there is nothing you need to install on your PC to make it work. Software as a Service. Even Microsoft is seeing this trend and is moving to make Microsoft Office available on the internet. No install required.

You can rent a virtual server from Amazon & if you pay more, the server becomes stronger & faster & has more memory & more storage. And there is none of the old opening the box, removing the old bits & putting in more powerful bits. You press the button & it gets bigger, and when you don’t need it, you press another button & it gets smaller. Platform as a Service. You can run your company’s file server or mail server or SAP system on one of these platforms.

We have a technology in the PC and server world called RAID. A way of splitting your data into portions & putting them on multiple disks. Many reasons, amongst them these two. Safety: if one disk breaks, we can recreate what was stored on it from the bits that was stored on the others. Performance: you’re able to write a large chunk of data quickly, because every disk only writes a small portion. Now, in the cloud, out there on the internet, there are technologies that does this on a grand scale. They store data across an incredibly large number of disks that is located across large numbers of data centres across the globe. Why? Safety & Performance. When one Yahoo or Google centre is down, the data is still everywhere & it is available VERY VERY fast. It is the type of technology that allows me to find an email from my wife about a show we were going to see in 2008 with my phone faster than I can find the last mail from my boss on my local mail program. We have grown used to these services, without appreciating the nature of the underlying change.

You start putting these things together & you begin to see what the cloud is. It is more than just “doing what we used to do, but only over the internet”. Cloud based services can grow when you need it, and shrink when you don’t. And you only pay per use; no investment required on your side. It has the potential to do things like data analysis better than we did before.

It becomes clear to me that we and our customers would benefit from moving to the cloud. But how? Step 1 seems to me that virtual server idea. Do not buy another server, but rent a virtual one. I’ve talked to some hosting providers that rent these virtual platforms as a service. We would need to re-skill some of our people. Traditional IT support people will not be needed to support platforms that are virtual; but our world is getting bigger and much more integrated and we need a new breed of IT support to orchestrate it.

I’ve also talked to some providers of telephony services – VoIP phones with a telephone exchange somewhere in the cloud. If we rent that type of service, I would be able to use my Android phone to make landline calls and use a little program on my laptop to answer my office phone when I am working from home.

The final session of the day was given by Rob Creemers, who call himself a trend watcher and market analyst. He showed a timeline graph that shows the industrial revolution, the information revolution and a new revolution – the cloud revolution. The current explosion of computing power becoming available will change the face of the earth, the way the industrial revolution did. He described advances in technology over the last 20 years and showed some current developments & some extrapolation of where this could take us. You already get TVs that have microphones & video cameras built-in, and that comes with Skype for video conferencing with the family. And he described what our footprint is doing to our planet; some pointers about oil & coal-burning and global warming. His best advice for the situation is that we should “move bytes and not atoms”. Use IP-based services to tele-commute instead of physically moving everyone to the same location. Use video conferencing tools instead of flying people to meetings.

The devices that we carry around with us, like our laptops and mobile phones, and the ones in our homes, like the TV, is allowing us to access this brave new world called the cloud. Now I must find a way to move my work deliverables there too.

While the smart phone market growth has so far mainly been driven by the high-end segment, the market is now reaching a tipping point where the mid-level makes up a growing proportion of that growth. Smart phones are becoming the standard!

The specifics of the Vodafone deal were not announced. Combined, Gartner estimates that the two acquired TEM companies generate under US$25M in revenue. Based on the estimated 2009 revenue of the acquired companies, their trended growth over the past 36 months as well as considering comparable TEM acquisitions; Gartner estimates that the two companies were likely acquired by Vodafone for less than US$40 million. TnT has appx 85, and Quickcomm 35 staff.

TMT Ventures announced the acquisition of Ezwim this week. TMT Ventures is an investor consortium in Telecommunications, Media & Technology, that intends to expand Ezwim’s business globally. For more information about this acquisition check out the press release.

The acquisitions made by Vodafone pose the question if a strategic buyer like Vodafone, in particular an operator, is a likely exit route for TEM players. On the one hand, the answer is evident as an operator like Vodafone has substantial cross-sell opportunities and can leverage the typical TEM product suite well. The counter argument is equally evident; why would it be in the interest of an operator to help decrease customers’ ARPU, and why would customers appreciate having an operator as TEM provider.

My view as a recent entry into the TEM market, is that it is increasingly likely for an operator to offer TEM services as part of their core portfolio. If anything, it should increase customer loyalty and provide differentiation to the typical operator portfolio that is otherwise quite homogeneous.

From a customer perspective, the recent acquisitions demonstrate the importance of telecom expense management tools for large customers to control telecom costs across the enterprise footprint. Enterprises are facing increased telecom spend as mobile data and personal usage costs are growing and employees are becoming more mobile and are using advanced mobile devices and services. They require increased visibility into, and control over their mobile and fixed communication assets and costs. In addition, customers, in particular in the multi-national space, tend to favor the ‘one throat to choke’ argument.

The timing of the Vodafone acquisitions has surprised investors as the market for TEM services is rapidly developing with many new and exciting products, and customer adaptation seems to recently (as in this year) has progressed into a mainstream service, at least here in Europe.

If it is the right exit route for TEM players in the long run, time will tell.

Increased productivity, improved efficiency and response times are some of the important benefits of wireless solutions. But to ensure cost control and security a formal mobility policy is crucial for any organization.

To ensure that policies will be effective, consider the following tips:

Policies should never be written in isolation, the people who are asked to use or enforce them may have differing opinions. A sole policy writer may also neglect things that are important to others. This is not to be taken lightly: enterprises need to get the right people involved, and should include as many people and groups as is practical.

Consider a usage policy per user group, enterprises should focus first on the target audience for mobile solutions, and second on what are the most appropriate and beneficial applications to a particular user group. The following three questions for mobility are important:

1. Who should have a device?
2. What applications should be mobilized?
3. What device platforms should be mobilized?

Insight into employee user costs, make sure you have insight into telecom costs across the organization and have the possibility to track policy compliance. Insight into telecom costs is not only important for management but also for individuals to be aware of their personal costs as it significantly raises cost awareness.

Management buy-in, management should enforce and buy into policies or the implementation of them may be adversely affected. Managers should be careful not to use their own handheld devices in ways that contravene policies, and they should demonstrate that adhering to policies is an issue they take seriously.

After you have defined a wireless policy, the implementation can start and in this phase it is crucial that employees know the policy and understand it. Training on the policy should also be part of the new hires’ orientation and periodic newsletters, workshops, or seminars can help explain the policy.

After employees are informed and can expect to comply to the corporate policies the organization should have the tooling in place to track policy compliance. Telecom Expense Management services are useful as they do not only help to gain insight into telecom costs it also helps to automate policy compliance through the implementation of business rules.
Mobile technology is rapidly changing therefore it is especially important to review and update the telecom policy every 12 months.

For more information also check out our webinar slides on developing an effective mobile policy

Shocking results!

These results provide important insights into the real-world experiences of mobile customers. Operators can do much more than they are currently doing to help customers avoid unexpected fees.

In Europe (European Union) mobile data roaming will be cut off at €50 and users will receive a warning when they reach 80% of the chosen limit. These measures were taken after enormous media exposure to “Bill Shocks” with a German traveler running up a €46.000 bill while downloading a movie in France. The typical operator response has been “tough luck” and please pay your bill as the operator has to pay the roaming operator. The EU has also taken an active role in regulating and reducing the cost of mobile voice and texting while in roaming, and addressing operator practices of “per minute billing” and “start fees”. More info at http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/10/215

The European reality has been that the cost of mobile roaming or international calls has moved away from the EU to North America, Middle East, India and China (See Ezwim Telecom Monitor, http://www.ezwim.com/news/ezwim-telecom-monitor-2008 ). So the question becomes what can operators or regulators do beyond the EU border? The EU could consider to have this topic included as part of their bi-lateral trade agreements or through the WTO (The world is flat…isn’t it?), and nothing stops operators to have a “cap” or “cut off” mechanism in non EU countries . Technically this is a matter of treating post-paid subscribers as if they were “pre-paid” subscribers when in roaming, this forces all calls to contact the home operator (HLR/VLR) and allows for setting a “wallet” against this service.

The research is about consumers, not businesses. However businesses generally have multiple service providers and contracts in multiple regions so the risk of experiencing Bill Shock is even higher than for customers. The highest shock bill we have seen at Ezwim was €32.000 when one of our clients was using Skype for calls (and listening to radio) while being Bahrain. Mobile data cost ~€5 per MB in Bahrain and Skype uses around 55 kB/sec.

This reality demonstrates the need for Telecom Management solutions; systematically and proactively managing telecom will almost certainly lead to more control on telecom costs and better services. It also shows the need for integrating Telecom Management solutions, like Ezwim, with Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions…..MDM provides the ability for real time call and data logging, Ezwim can use this data for real time forecasting or calculating the cost per call or data session.